Castle: A Novel (21 page)

My fall, however, when it came, was not the expected kind. I did not trip over a bramble or root; I did not lose my footing on a tricky rise. I was running, my feet pounding on the forest floor—and then, suddenly, I was running through the air, and falling. Before I understood what was even happening, my face and body struck dirt and I felt something crack deep in my nose. Next I knew, I was lying on the ground, sharp sticks poking into my back, my head screaming, my breath caught in my throat, my back afire with pain. I was at the bottom of a pit—perhaps, though not necessarily, the same one I had fallen into before. And this time, the sticks at the bottom
had
done their work: I was bleeding, and ribs had surely been broken. When I tried to roll over, I convulsed in agony. I looked up and saw the section of the pit wall I must have struck. I reached up and touched my face, and the pain sent me into a swoon. I passed out.

When I came to, it was daylight, and sunshine filtered down through the leaves. I heard a slow crunching in the humus above me: the sound of careful footsteps. I tried to right myself, and my body protested, and I fell back. I called out, a wordless cry that sounded like nothing that had ever come out of my mouth before. And then I managed a single word, “Help!”

A shadow fell across my face: a figure stood on the lip of the pit, peering down at me. I squinted at the silhouette, my eyes still struggling to adjust to the sun.

“Please,” I said, and my voice was thick with sleep, hoarse and cracked as if by hours of screaming. “Help me.”

The figure knelt, his hands braced on the edge of the pit. It was a man, I was certain of that now: a rugged man, his face strong, the eyes dark and intense and trained upon me. On his face was no expression at all.

I squeezed my eyes shut, and when they opened, I recognized the impassive face that hovered before me. It was my own.

NINETEEN

I knelt, my hands braced on the edge of the pit. The man inside was curled in a corner, his arms around his knees. The pit was ten feet deep, five by five feet in breadth, and made of cement; I had overseen its construction the year before. The floor sloped down to a central drain covered by a metal grate the size of a coffee can lid.

We had built the pit as a disposal for liquid waste; there were two more like it here in the yard of the detention center. The soldier who had come to get me was standing ten feet back, next to two others, all three of them holding the M243 squad assault rifles that three months ago I had promised would soon be replaced by more effective weapons. The men were bored, the detainee was weeping, and all of us were very hot. We had put this man out here after an outburst in his cell during a sandstorm the day before, and he hadn’t been given food or water since.

I took pity on the man and threw down the canteen I had brought for him. The cap was loose and the water began to leak out onto the cement. The detainee grabbed it and greedily drank what was left.

The solider who had summoned me stood waiting. His name was Fayette, and I must confess to some sympathy for him. He was a beefy young man, a former football player who had put on weight since he was deployed here, in spite of the terrible food; he appeared to squirm inside his uniform in an agony of sweat and discomfort. I approached him purposefully, betraying no emotion. The others stepped away, turning their backs to us.

“Why did you come to me, soldier?” I asked him.

“The detainee, sir. He was freaking out.”

“You said he wanted water.”

“Yessir,” Fayette said. “He was saying water, sir, the rest he was just talking Arabic.”

Behind me, in the pit, the detainee resumed crying.

Fayette and I stared at each other until he turned away. Beyond us, over the wall to the southeast, was Balad Air Base, its control tower visible from where we stood. In the other direction was the runway, and past that lay the barracks of Logistics Support Area Anaconda. All that could be seen from the bottom of the pit, on the other hand, was a square of sky—I knew this because I had climbed down in it, some days before, while assessing it for possible repurposing as an aid to the extraction of intelligence. So far, this tactic was not working well.

“Get the canteen back from him when he’s done,” I said, and went back inside.

I was a chief warrant officer in the U.S. Army, a logistics expert charged with overseeing the construction of a new detention center in Iraq for the processing and temporary housing of detainees arrested in connection with terrorism, and with gathering information from those detainees. Our facility had seventy-five units, and was capable of accommodating 150 detainees, but we’d never expected to fill it—rather, it had been designed as a high-value temporary detention site for persons of great importance to U.S. intelligence. When the facility opened, it held several members of Saddam Hussein’s regime, and a number of suspected al-Qaida operatives, spillover from the detention center at Camp Cropper. The facility—which came to be known as Camp Alastor—was medium-sized, with a double-fenced compound anchored by four towers surrounding an impenetrable L-shaped concrete enclosure. I had designed it.

Our corner of Anaconda was desolate, with only dirt and sand for a half mile in each direction, and no sound but that of wind, and of planes taking off and landing. And for all my pride at my work on the facility, I had expected it to remain a lonely outpost on the edge of the base. Indeed, I’d imagined that within a year’s time after the site’s construction, we would all be redeployed, and the facility would slowly fill up with blown dust. The war, after all, was supposed to be brief.

Instead, in the summer of 2004, we received a new influx of detainees. We were told they were terrorists, captured by the First Armored and First Cavalry divisions during sweeps of suspect neighborhoods in Baghdad, and we were assigned to keep them isolated from one another, and to begin gathering intelligence from them.

To be truthful, I was at first quite excited by this development. The initial trickle of detainees had disappointed me somewhat—the Baathists had turned out not to be remotely close to Saddam, and were eventually freed; the purported al-Qaida operatives were mostly street criminals, who had little information to offer, and resigned themselves quickly to imprisonment. I was eager to prove myself as an information specialist, having arrived at my rank through my infrastucture expertise, and I wished to demonstrate to my commanding officers that these areas of endeavor were, in fact, intimately connected—an idea that they had at first resisted. Thus far, I had failed to make much progress, owing to the dearth of subjects; now, unexpectedly, I could put my ideas to the test.

But things immediately became complicated. In three weeks, we received 280 detainees, far in excess of our capacity. Some of the detainees were very young, as young as thirteen, according to our two reliable translators, who had spoken to them. There were four women, one of them pregnant. According to her documentation, she had been found in a house containing terrorist suspects, some of whom had been killed in combat, and she was to be questioned for information pertaining to their activities. In addition, a rifle had been found in the bedroom where she slept, and so she herself was also under suspicion, in spite of her condition. It was at this time that I began to feel out of my depth, and to worry that I was in danger of losing the firm control of the facility that I had taken such great pride in maintaining.

Up to this point my military career had been a textbook success, even if my path to this success had proved unusual. As it happens, I was well prepared for army life by Doctor Stiles and his unorthodox methods of training. This training, unfortunately, had been brought to an abrupt end not long after the terrifying night I spent in the woods; it appeared that my mother had prevailed, having given my father some kind of ultimatum that he could not ignore. But I didn’t forget the Doctor, and when I grew old enough to use public transportation on my own, I took a bus to the college to visit with him. These visits became a regular part of my adolescence, and we carried on long, intense conversations about politics, society, and war.

Eventually, however, the Doctor disappeared, and along with him my sense of moral direction. My parents’ marriage appeared to be in shambles, and I spent most of my time away from home, taking long walks along the railroad tracks, or camping out in the woods by myself. In time, I moved out, gathering my things into a duffel bag and riding a freight train out of Gerrysburg. I didn’t finish high school, and only later would I earn my equivalency degree through an army program. I wandered around the Midwest for several years, doing manual labor—mostly landscaping—and rarely keeping an address for more than a few months.

I might have continued on this path for years, for I felt as though my life had lost its direction, if it ever had one; and I spent my days in a state that today would be diagnosed as depression. Then my parents died. I was devastated—not by their absence, which I had grown accustomed to, but by the fragility of their lives, and the banality of their deaths. I feared a similar fate for myself—indeed, in the weeks after their passing, such an outcome seemed inevitable. But soon this fear gave way to frustration: at the meaninglessness of life, at the laziness of my generation, at the way we took America and its accomplishments for granted. While I was drifting along the West Coast, I witnessed a group of youths mocking an army recruiter in a public square, and I muscled through the crowd and impulsively enlisted. The rightness of this gesture invigorated me; it was the most definitive act I had ever performed, and I never looked back.

It did not take long for me to be singled out by my commanding officer, for my intelligence and my potential for advancement. Once I had my high school diploma, I was transferred into the warrant officer school at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri; and upon completing the program there, I assisted in the organization and planning of several bases inside our borders. Later I was shipped overseas to help renovate and repurpose the army’s European assets. At the time Operation Iraqi Freedom began, I was working alongside a team of architects and contractors on the design and maintenance of bases.

But something was missing in my career, and it took a curious incident to make me realize what it was. I had been visiting a base in Japan, in order to inspect an aging barracks that was under reconstruction, when I happened to overhear, through a half-open door, the sound of an officer reprimanding a soldier. I paused and took a surreptitious glance into the room, a small windowless office containing a desk, a filing cabinet, and a computer. The soldier in question was standing at attention in front of the desk; meanwhile, the officer sat behind it, part of his body blocked from the soldier’s view by the large, already-obsolete computer monitor. To his credit, the soldier seemed to display the proper respect for his superior. But the officer himself appeared small, weak, and uncomfortable, hemmed in by the trappings of his position.

Over the next few weeks, I thought a great deal about the ergonomics of military life. I made a few sketches of bases, barracks, and prisons that incorporated my recent thinking, and showed them to the officer, a CWO3, under whom my division was then working. He passed them on to his superior, and soon I found myself face-to-face with a CWO5 and a brigadier general, who pointed to my prison drawing and said, “We want you to build that.” He was referring to the project that would eventually become Camp Alastor.

Needless to say, I was pleased. But my reassignment to the prison project gave me pause. I had had no direct experience in this arena, and was quick to remind my superior officers of this when they informed me of my redeployment. Their response was to remind me that this assignment was to be considered an honor, and they assured me that the higher-ups had perfect confidence in my abilities.

And for some time, it appeared that this confidence was justified. I led a team that included two architects, several builders, and a consultant CWO2 from Military Intelligence, and we completed our work under budget and ahead of schedule. Rumors abounded of the disastrous exploits of civilian contractors, with their bloated budgets, corrupt middlemen, and poor skills, and we were delighted to be able to report our successes to our commanding officers and prove ourselves superior to our rivals. When, early in the spring, the prison at last opened its doors and began accepting detainees, I led their questioning, bolstered by my structural improvements to the interrogation environment. The facility’s labyrinthine corridors, through which we led detainees in different directions at different times, contributed to a general sense of confusion and dependency; windows as narrow as arrow slits, drilled through overspec’d, two-foot-thick walls, reinforced the impossibility of escape. Cell floors were angled slightly down from the corridors, elevating army personnel several inches above the cells’ inhabitants, making them feel helpless and overpowered. Intelligence-gathering, its limited utility notwithstanding, went smoothly, with few attempts at resistance.

The overall feel of the facility was one of calm. The dry season had not yet begun, and the interior of the building, and of our barracks, remained fairly cool, in spite of the brilliant sun. The detainees were far from cheerful, but we fielded few unreasonable complaints, and were only rarely forced to break up a fight, or settle a disagreement. Quiet Arabic conversation filled the halls; it seemed the detainees, like us, had settled in to wait, and to see what happened next. The only incongruous element during these nervous, patient days was a sound: a low, mournful whistling. Not quite tuneless, but embracing no particular melody, it sometimes had the quality of a plaintive call, as though for a beloved pet. At other times, it sounded like a small, elusive movement of some forgotten sonata; still other times it sounded like the wind. We didn’t know who was doing the whistling, or why, but as the days lengthened, it became a soundtrack to life in the facility, an ever-present, if elegiac, companion to our work.

Then came the summer.

The weather was very hot and dry. There was some relief from the
shamal
winds, when they blew; but when the air was still, time seemed to stand still with it, and the temperature routinely rose above 110 degrees. The weeks dragged by, and more detainees arrived. We requisitioned temporary off-site housing for them, but none was forthcoming, as supply lines were clogged, and the detainees, we were told, were far too dangerous to be housed outside the main compound. And so, instead, I ordered construction to begin on a new wing of the facility, and soon it was under way. Through it all, the days were colored by the aimless whistling that haunted the corridors—and though it was bothersome, no one complained, as though, in some oblique way, they thought they deserved it.

It was around this time that I first took notice of the boy, the thirteen-year-old who had come in around the same time as the pregnant woman. We had housed him in the area of the L where our three female detainees were held, and they now all occupied the same cell, at the very end of the hallway, where they could at least experience some modicum of privacy. It was off of this hallway that I had decided the new wing would be built, and I found myself here quite often, supervising the demolition of the outer wall and the construction of a new passageway. The boy’s name, I learned, was Sufian.

Most of the detainees would spend their time slumped against the walls of their cells in silence. Some talked in low tones. Many of them had a copy of the Qur’an, but most had nothing. Because we had never received the shipment of inmate uniforms we had been expecting, they were dressed in the clothes in which they had been captured, trousers and short-sleeved shirts,
abayahs
and dishdashas, and in this respect, Sufian was no different. He wore a filthy dishdasha, its grubby fabric torn and stained, and he sat on the floor at the front of the cell, peering through the steel mesh as we worked.